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PRESENTED MY 



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ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



an a&Dtegg 

By JOHN D. LONG 



AT THE 



CENTENNIAL IN SYMPHONY HALL, BOSTON 
February 12, IQOQ 



W. B. CLARKE COMPANY 

26 and 28 Tremont Street 

BOSTON 

1909 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



By JOHN D. LONG 



AT THE 



CENTENNIAL IN SYMPHONY HALL, BOSTON 
February 12, igog 



W. B. CLARKE COMPANY 

26 and 28 Tremont Street 

BOSTON 

1909 



4 

slaved or weak and erring brother! And beneath 
that proverbial wit which so often lighted it there 
lay also the fountain of tears. An exquisite pathos 
breathed from the chords of a sympathetic, softly 
attuned nature, as if you caught from them the sen- 
sitive wistful tones of Schumann's "Traumerei." 

It is an unfounded notion that the conditions of our 
frontier life — alas! we no longer have any frontier — 
are to be counted unfavorable. On the contrary, they 
have been, from the days when Massachusetts was 
herself a frontier, the best soil for characteristic Amer- 
ican ambition and growth. There are those who ex- 
press surprise that Lincoln was the product of what 
they deem the narrow and scanty environment from 
which he sprang. As well wonder at the giant of the 
forest, deep rooted, bathing its top in the upper air, 
fearless of scorch of sun or blast of tempest, sprung 
from the fertile soil and luxuriant growth of the virgin 
earth, and rich with the fragrance and glory of nature's 
paradise! I can hardly think of a life more fortunate. 
The Lincolns settled in Hingham Massachusetts a 
few years after the coming of the Mayflower. The 
family ranks with our early Puritan nobility of worth 
and character. One branch of it migrated to Penn- 
sylvania and thence to Virginia. More than a hun- 
dred years ago Lincoln's grandfather went thence to 
Kentucky, built a log cabin, cleared a farm, and was 
killed by Indians. Lincoln's father was of the same 
sort, pioneer, farmer, hunter, uneducated but in 
touch with the sturdy qualities that were the mark 
of the Kentucky settlers. His mother, dying in his 
early boyhood, was a woman of beauty, of character, 



and of education enough to teach her husband to 
write his name. His stepmother, saintly Christian 
soul, sheltered the orphan under her loving care and, 
scanty as was their lot, allured him to brighter worlds 
and led the way. Compared with the luxurious pro- 
fusion of to-day, it was wretched and hopeless pov- 
erty; but, compared with the standard of the then 
neighborhood and time, — the only right standard, — it 
was the independence of men who owned the land, 
who strode masters of the soil, who were barons, not 
serfs, who were equal with their associates, and among 
whom the child Abraham Lincoln, eating his bread 
and milk from a wooden bowl as he sat on the thresh- 
old of his father's cabin, one side of it wide open to 
the weather, was no more an object of despair or pity 
than the babe who, cradled among the flags by the riv- 
er's brink, dreamed of the hosts of Israel to whom he 
should reveal the tables of the law of God, and whom 
he should lead to the green pastures of the promised 
land. It is not because the same or like qualities of 
character do not still inhere in human nature that 
America — nay, the world — will never again see the like 
of Lincoln, but because the circumstances of his early 
and later life can never be reproduced. America, 
alas! has already grown old, — old with power, with 
wealth, with the exhausting ravage and absorption of 
her territory, and with the infusions of what we used 
to call the Old World. The frame-setting of Abraham 
Lincoln's youth is as absolutely gone as the great 
American desert, now a garden, or the buffalo and his 
Indian chaser, now ghosts of a dream. 
Nor is it true that Lincoln had no education in his 



boyhood. He, indeed, went little to school, yet he 
learned to read, write, and cipher; and what more does 
any school-boy learn to-day? " Reading," says Bacon, 
summing up education, "maketh a full man, con- 
ference a ready man, and writing an exact man." All 
these had the youth Abraham Lincoln. With them he 
stood at the gate of all treasures, key in hand, as much 
master of the future as a graduate of Yale or Harvard. 
He knew the Bible thoroughly, iEsop's Fables, Pil- 
grim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, the lives of Wash- 
ington and Henry Clay, Burns and later Shakespeare. 
He not only read them with the eye, but made them 
a part of his mind. The list is small, but it is a range 
of history and poetry. Washington and Clay may well 
have been the spur of Lincoln's ambitious American- 
ism; the Bible and Burns, of his inspiration and sen- 
timent and unexcelled style; iEsop's Fables and Pil- 
grim's Progress, of his aptness of illustration. 

The incidents of his early life are few, but sugges- 
tive. At nineteen he made a trip down the Mississippi 
River on a flat-boat to New Orleans, and there sold a 
cargo, — a trip of larger education than Thomas Jeffer- 
son had ever taken at the same age. A year later his 
father, who for four years had been living in Indiana, 
went to Illinois; and the boy, driving the ox-team 
which bore all the household goods, helping build the 
home of logs and split the rails of the farm fence, — 
those rails so famous afterwards, — was thus a resident 
of three States of the Union before his majority, three 
States representing the very growth of his magnificent 
country. Coming of age, he made a second flat-boat 
descent to New Orleans. It was there he saw for the 



first time the chaining, whipping, and sale of negroes, 
and it may be that the impression then made inspired 
those immortal words in his second inaugural: — 

"Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that 
this mighty scourge of war may soon pass away. Yet 
if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled 
by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of 
unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop 
of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another 
drawn with the sword, — as was said three thousand 
years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of 
the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' " 

Returning to Illinois, he was clerk in a village store, 
which meant again opportunities by no means suf- 
fering under comparison with those of a college grad- 
uate of to-day in a lawyer's or broker's office in the 
city. It meant constant discussion of political, re- 
ligious, and social questions. It meant a struggle for 
mastery in physical exercise and grocery store debate. 
At twenty-three, in the Black Hawk War, Lincoln 
was captain of a military company, — another step in 
large American life. Then he "kept store," where 
his honesty won him the name of "Honest Abe." 
At twenty-four he was postmaster of the village, — in 
other words, the centre and conduit of its intelligence. 
All this time he was absorbing every book he could 
get, learning law and mathematics, and, when his store 
became a failure, supported himself by surveying. He 
had already engaged in political life, often addressed 
his fellow-citizens with telling effect, was defeated 
as a candidate for the Illinois House of Representa- 
tives when twenty-three, and elected at twenty-five. 



8 

Review this first chapter, and tell me where can be 
found a better preparation for an American career. 
To what one of whom we call the favored youths of the 
land have not his splendid advantages of social posi- 
tion and university education sometimes seemed an 
obstacle rather than a help in the path that leads 
through the popular hedge to the popular service? 
Hard lines! Lincoln's is rather one of the illustriously 
fortunate careers of young men. The accidents of 
hard manual toil, scanty living, no money, splitting 
of rails, are only the paint and pasteboard of the scene, 
the tricks with which rhetoric loves to embellish the 
contrasts of a eulogy. "A man's a man for a' that." 

Lincoln was re-elected three times to the legislature, 
serving with Douglas and others who, like himself, 
became afterwards famous. He identified himself 
with anti-slavery measures, protesting with only one 
other associate, at a time when even a protest was 
almost political martyrdom, against the extremities of 
pro-slavery. Meantime he went into the practice of the 
law, where again his opportunity was large. Each 
county had its court-house and this, rude as it might 
be, was always, in the absence of other attractions, — and 
there were few other attractions, — the centre of popular 
interest and attendance, the arena for advocacy and trial. 
From one to another the lawyers rode a circuit. Among 
them were some of the brightest men of the time, 
afterwards potent in national councils, among whom 
Lincoln's genius of homely power soon bore him to the 
front, a favorite alike with clients and the bar. With 
this came still further prominence in all public range. 
He delivered lectures on politics, temperance, literature, 



and inventions. He was a favorite on the stump. An 
ardent Henry Clay Whig, he was often pitted against 
Douglas and other Democratic leaders. He was a 
moving spirit in the Harrison campaign of 1840 and 
the Clay and Polk campaign in 1844, being on the Illi- 
nois Whig electoral ticket each time, the second time 
at its head. In 1848, as afterwards just before the 
war, he spoke in New England. When, therefore, either 
as a matter of reproach or apotheosis, his candidacy 
for the Presidency in 1860 is referred to as that of an un- 
known Illinois rail-splitter, it is well enough to remem- 
ber that some twenty years before that time he was 
among the foremost men in his region, as from 1855 
to 1861 he was the foremost popular champion of anti- 
slavery principles in the North-west. 

In 1847 he entered the 30th Congress of the United 
States. There he introduced and vigorously advo- 
cated pungent resolutions concerning the Mexican War 
and a bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, 
— a measure which afterwards became law by his Presi- 
dential approval. For the next decade he devoted 
himself mainly to the law, in which he earned a modest 
competence. 

Had his life ended here, it would have been a fortu- 
nate and successful life, indeed, but we should not be 
celebrating it to-day. But it did not end here. This 
was only the vestibule opening into the temple of the 
Lord, where he was to be at once the high priest and 
the sacrifice. 

Since our national independence began, there have 
been three great eras: first, the adoption of the Con- 
stitution under Madison and Hamilton; second, its 



10 

construction by interpretation under Marshall and 
Webster, which gave the Federal Union a larger range of 
sovereignty than its strict letter; and, third, the exer- 
cise of that sovereignty, resulting in the entirety of the 
republic, the abolition of slavery, and the equality of 
citizenship under Abraham Lincoln. Of this last era 
Lincoln was a typical spokesman and representative 
more than any other man. Other men may have at 
times more brilliantly illuminated the path. He, by 
force of circumstances and his own force, was the path 
itself. Seward stated, but Lincoln both stated and cut 
the Gordian knot of the irrepressible conflict. 

The founders of our constitutional government ex- 
pected the early extinction of slavery. Side by side 
Northerner and Southerner, Jefferson and Franklin, 
argued for its restriction. Their anticipations were 
not fulfilled. The cotton interest became identified 
with the possession and extension of slave labor. 
The slave power was the nerve centre of the south- 
ern half of the United States and, for a period, of 
our whole political system. It infibred Northern 
pecuniary interests in its mesh, and they became pro 
tanto sharers in the responsibility for it. For years it 
dominated the national government. It added new 
States to its circle. It fought to keep equal pace with 
the institutions of freedom. It repealed compromises 
that barred its loathsome efflux upon the fair territorial 
lands on which the sunlight of liberty was dawning. It 
recaptured its fugitive slaves in Northern capitals. It 
threatened the Union when the eagle of freedom shrieked. 
And at last, under the Dred Scott decision, it claimed 
protection and the right of enslavement even in the 



11 

territories. There was but one step more, and that was 
that the slave-owner might marshal his slaves in the 
free States themselves,— ay, even under the shadow of 
Bunker Hill. The crisis had come, indeed. In short, as 
Lincoln put it in those memorable words, "A house 
divided against itself cannot stand. I believe that this 
government cannot endure permanently half slave and 
half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. 
I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will 
cease to be divided. It will be all one thing or all the 
other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the 
further spread of it or its advocates will push it forward 
till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as 
well as new, north as well as south." 

Stephen A. Douglas, senator from Illinois, one of the 
most forcible men in our history, had taken the ground, 
called the doctrine of Squatter Sovereignty, that the 
people of a Territory should decide for themselves 
whether slavery should exist there or not. Plausible 
as it seemed, it ignored the slave, and Lincoln exploded 
it with the simple formula that it amounted simply to 
this, "That, if any one man chose to enslave another, no 
third man shall be allowed to object/' Grant, as he 
did, that slavery had a constitutional existence in the 
slave States where it was established, yet the moment 
it sought to enslave any human being in the Territories 
of the United States it became there an unwarranted 
crime against humanity, and the government was bound 
in conscience and in duty to resist it by every means in 
its power, and to keep the national Territories for the 
homes and shrines of freedom. From 1854 to 1861 the 
debate between these great gladiators raged. The gory 



12 

battlefields of history are not so inspiring as this battle 
between conscience and crime. Neither of the men was 
fifty years old, both sons of the farm, makers of their 
own fortunes, leaders of the people speaking to millions 
of their countrymen, and standing, one of Northern 
birth for the right of the extension of slavery, the other 
Southern born for its restriction and for a Union which 
should cease to be divided and thereby ultimately 
become all free. 

It was not a matter of chance that Lincoln was the 
champion of freedom. That he was so proves the 
steady preparation and the commanding talents which 
fitted him for the place. By the Illinois legislature of 
1855 he had come very near to be chosen United States 
senator; and at the Republican National Convention 
in 1856 he received 110 votes as candidate for the Vice- 
Presidency on the part of the Republican party, of 
which meantime he had become one of the founders, 
and of which he was thenceforth in the North-west the 
undoubted leader. At its conventions in Illinois he was 
its spokesman, and in 1858 contested with Douglas 
before the people the issue of the next United States 
senatorship. It was in this contest that Lincoln chal- 
lenged Douglas to a series of six joint debates, which 
are the most remarkable and influential of their kind 
in American, if not in all forensic, history. Nor was it 
by any means a one-sided contest, either in the matter 
of the debate or of the men who debated it. Here, 
again, do not count Lincoln less than he was. He was 
now a master thoroughly equipped for the discussion. 
It is doubtful whether his superior for that work could 
have been found in the whole country. Massachusetts, 



13 

New York, Ohio, and other States were rich in material; 
but which of their orators, what Sumner or Seward or 
Chase, could have brought to that arena of the plain 
people the lance or mail that would have made or met 
the charge like his? 

It is a time in Lincoln's life to be dwelt upon, be- 
cause then was the formative process of public sen- 
timent, of which his administration later was the 
expression. In this great debate he planted his feet 
on the rock of the Declaration of Independence, which 
had always been and always was his political phi- 
losophy and faith. Again and again, at this time and 
forever after, he returned to it. Its imperishable in- 
spiration to him was Union and Liberty, — first, the en- 
tirety of an indissoluble union, which must be either 
all slave or all free, but which, second, must be all 
free because "all men are created equal." 

Ah, those old anti-slavery days which, so swift is 
time, not many of you here recall ! Not even the lustre 
of the Revolutionary period bursting into national 
independence shone with such beauty of holiness, 
such moral effulgence, such ardor for the enfranchise- 
ment, not of a nation conscious only of general mild 
subjection to laws in the making of which it did not 
have direct representation, but of a proletariat of poor, 
despised, enslaved but fellow human beings. It is 
this which makes the anti-slavery crusade the era of 
our New England chivalry. Then its true knight 
couched his lance and its minstrel sang. It brought 
not peace, but a sword. It nerved the iron will of 
Garrison, who would not equivocate and who would 
be heard. It rang from the lips of Phillips, that Puri- 



14 

tan Apollo, more beautiful than the son of Latona 
and higher-bred, whose tongue was his lute and whose 
swift shaft was winged with the immortal fire of liberty. 
It pointed the rhyme of Lowell, and transformed a 
Boston Brahmin into a Down East Bird of Freedom. 
It made Whittier the expression in verse of New Eng- 
land's intense and passionate impulse for freedom and 
for breaking all chains that bind the limb or mind of 
any brother man, — an unplumed knight in Quaker 
garb. It throbbed with magnetic fervor in the heart 
of Andrew. It inspired the pen of Mrs. Stowe. Elec- 
trified by her genius, the great popular heart thrilled 
with veneration and sympathy for the meek and lowly 
Christian in bondage, Uncle Tom. Its heroisms fired 
the student, and Harvard and her sisters were again the 
mothers of heroes. Its passion culminated in the im- 
mortal hymn of Mrs. Howe, and cried aloud, — 

"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." 

But why name these and not also the dwellers in 
unnumbered homes of plain living and high thinking 
all over the land, under the shadow of Plymouth 
Rock, and along the sea and among the farms, as well 
as in the abodes of culture and wealth, peers of the 
exaltation of their leaders, kindled with equal en- 
thusiasm for human rights, fired with the reformer's 
zeal, and later giving themselves and their sons a sac- 
rifice upon the altar of their faith on the field of bat- 
tle and of blood? As Christ died to make men holy, 
so they died to make men free. All honor to them and to 
you their veteran surviving comrades here to-night! 

It was, indeed, the era of the tumultuous upheaval 



15 

of the moral sense. It was the burst of the thunder- 
cloud, and its lightnings fell and its rains descended 
and its floods poured, and the house built upon the 
sand of inhumanity fell, and great was the fall thereof. 
Of course there were extravagances and extremists. 
Bitterness and passion and sectional inflammations 
raged, but above them, as we look back, like Neptune 
rising above the tumult of the waves, the figure of 
Lincoln dominates the scene. His voice is calm, but 
reaches all abroad. It gathers the bolts of the storm 
into his hand. He gives utterance to the great under- 
lying public sentiment of the time. He becomes the 
embodiment of the common sense. Others may have 
more passionately stirred and inflamed the popular 
heart. He stirred, but also guided it. Patiently, but 
surely, he led the way, and at the last his was the hand 
that struck the fetters from the slave. Well is it that 
Boston, through the munificence of one of her citizens, 
has in one of her busy public squares set up his 
statue beside which a kneeling slave, just set free, 
forgets the broken fetters at his feet as with adoring 
eyes he looks up into the face, and bends beneath the 
benediction of the hand, of his Christ and Saviour. 

In the contest with Douglas, Lincoln won the popular 
vote, Douglas the legislature and the senatorship. 
But it meant for Lincoln the Presidency. His fame 
was now national. In 1859 he spoke in Kansas, the 
daughter of the anti-slavery crusade, a virgin and beau- 
tiful Andromeda, whose rescue was the death-knell 
of the monster of slavery, to whom she had been ex- 
posed. In the same year he spoke memorably in Ohio. 
In February, 1860, he made his famous speech at the 



16 

Cooper Institute in New York City, and thereby won 
the Presidency from the East. It is a picture worth 
recalling. The boy of the farm, the splitter of rails, 
the country storekeeper and postmaster, the peri- 
patetic surveyor too poor to own his instruments, the 
circuit lawyer, the stump speaker and lank humorist 
of the prairie who had recently won his spurs in the 
open-air debate with Douglas, stood before the culture 
and enterprise of the metropolis of the New World. 
His presiding officer was Bryant, poet and patriot, — 
our Bryant. His platform was arrayed with the most 
eminent merchants, scholars, lawyers, clergymen, 
business men, of the city. His audience was the 
critical intelligence of America. There was no doubt 
a kindly, half-patronizing curiosity to hear an uncouth 
champion of the West, who had crossed swords with 
the " Little Giant." If so, it quickly turned to the dis- 
criminating admiration which an Athenian audience 
might have felt and expressed as the orator rose to 
his theme, and in the pure and simple eloquence of can- 
dor, with an entire mastery of his subject, delivered 
an address which planted the Republican sentiment 
of the nation on an impregnable foundation. Lincoln's 
speeches became thenceforth the ready-at-hand material 
of every New England fireside. 

Under these circumstances his nomination as the 
Republican candidate for the Presidency in 1860 was 
the natural evolution of events. It was the selection 
of the one man who in the popular mind, by and large, 
represented the national protest against the aggres- 
sion of the slave power in the South and of subservi- 
ency to it in the North, who could rally alike in East 



17 

and West the strongest popular vote, and who could 
best hold together the patriotic sentiment of the free 
States themselves when the shock of war should come, 
not only rending apart North and South, but endanger- 
ing even in the North the harmony of its common 
allegiance. At the convention held in Chicago, May, 
1860, Lincoln was nominated on the third ballot, and 
in the following November elected to the Presidency. 

Never in the history of the Union was there a more 
critical and gloomy time than the interval between 
Lincoln's election in November and his inauguration in 
March. The attempted dissolution of the republic had 
come. Webster's prophetic nightmare was now a liv- 
ing horror. The helm of state wavered in the palsied 
hand of Buchanan. State after State seceded. Faith- 
less and dishonest cabinet officers were honeycombing 
the military and naval strength of the federal govern- 
ment. Treason plotted in the capital. The very life 
of the President-elect was in danger when he left his 
home and made his way to Washington. His inaugural 
marked the new era in his life, — a new departure, some- 
times disappointing his friends, but approved by the 
result and signalizing the greatness of the man, — a 
greatness sufficient to adapt itself to new exigencies, to 
comprehend the whole vast situation, and to direct the 
thunderbolts of the storm. Up to this time he had 
been the charging and resistless advocate and prophet. 
He was now the cautious and deliberate administrator. 
He had approved himself the genius of the spoken con- 
science. He was now to approve himself the wise 
master of situations, responsibilities, and expediencies. 
He had been among the foremost to court the peril 



18 

of driving the Ship of State into the angry straits. Now 
at the helm, he was the careful pilot, shy of Scylla, on 
the one hand, and of Charybdis, on the other. He who 
had seemed the boldest was now often censured as timid 
and as withholding his hand from the plough. He 
had been the outspoken antagonist of the slave power. 
Now he seemed fearful lest he should invade its slight- 
est constitutional right. For forever in his mind was 
the purpose of the Declaration of Independence, — the 
Union of the States, with liberty its corner-stone. Of 
this Union he remembered that he had been elected 
President, and that on him — on him, perhaps, alone — 
was the awful responsibility of its preservation un- 
broken. To this duty he seemed to feel himself bound 
to sacrifice all else. The crisis that faced him was the 
crisis of that Union on the point of disruption, and to 
avert that peril he bent everything. Eleven States 
had seceded. If the border slave States, which with 
good reason he believed to hold the balance of power, 
should secede also, the breach would be irreparable and 
the Union at an end. Because of this, caution and 
prudence, especially in dealing with the slave problem, 
were the characteristics of his early administration, 
sometimes exasperating his warmest supporters and the 
enthusiastic patriots of the North, but held to with 
serene and unflinching fidelity because they were the 
result of profound conviction. 

In the light of succeeding events, especially of the 
early defeat at Bull Run, history justifies him. Ken- 
tucky, Missouri, Maryland, were never lost, nor Ten- 
nessee or Virginia, except in part. The conservative 
element in the North, on which the Southern leaders 



19 

counted confidently, was kept in line till that line was 
beyond breaking. I doubt if the world has a nobler 
or a more pathetic picture than that of President 
Lincoln in those days, — that magnanimous soul, that 
spirit without guile or malice, that prophet among 
the anti-slavery crusaders whose heart was still as loyal 
to their cause and as tender of the shackled slave as 
was that of Garrison or Sumner or Phillips, but conse- 
crated to his great responsibilities as God gave him to 
see them, superior to the assault of enemies or the im- 
patience of friends, single-eyed to the preservation of the 
Union because the preservation of the Union involved 
every hope he cherished for his country, its destruction 
every calamity which for her he feared. I love to think 
that in the great providence of compensation God 
meantime gave him to know that he was right, as at 
the end he knew it when he walked the streets of Rich- 
mond one April day, preserver of the Union, emanci- 
pator of the slave. 

Disasters on the field came in those early months 
thick and fast, like successive overwhelming waves. 
The unsuccess in command of many a soldier at the 
head of the army, inadequate to the task, seemed to 
waste years of agonizing suspense in the swamps of Vir- 
ginia. But, as the glacier moves, so slowly the resistless 
forces of freedom moved on. From the West came the 
victories of Grant, and then Grant himself, who solved 
the riddle of war by striking the enemies' forces, not by 
withdrawing his own, but by moving on his adversaries' 
works immediately, by fighting his campaigns through, 
and by fighting them out on that line if it took all sum- 
mer. Complications with foreign nations had been 



20 

wisely avoided. Seward, whose services as Secretary 
of State should never be forgotten, yet had found in 
Lincoln a more discreet hand than his own in the Trent 
negotiations, in which the United States, though clearly 
justified by British precedent and doctrine, yielded its 
contention hardly more to a prudent policy of concilia- 
tion than to its own traditional and more liberal theory 
of the rights of neutrals on the high seas. The patriotic 
sentiment of the North had already crystallized under 
Lincoln's wise prudence into co-operation. The border 
States were secured. Slavery, surely crumbling under 
his policy, more surely, it may now in his vindication be 
said, than if the first blow had been straight betwixt the 
eyes of the monster, was abolished in the District of 
Columbia. Colored troops were enlisted, and the 
freedmen, wearing the uniform of the country of which 
they were henceforth to be the equal citizens of the 
Declaration of Independence, were enrolling their names 
at Wagner and Olustee on the topmast scroll of the 
heroic dead. Meantime the emancipation of slaves 
in the loyal States, under a system of compensation, 
had been considerately urged upon their owners by the 
President. Indeed, every step was taken to conciliate 
whatever interest was at stake. And when in Septem- 
ber, 1862, he announced his emancipation proclama- 
tion, and on the first day of January, 1863, gave it life, 
the country was ripe for its reception and enforcement 
as the timely and consummate fruit of God's providence 
and of the administration's faithful execution of its 
evolving duty. Then came Gettysburg and Vicks- 
burg and Appomattox; and then that sight, — oh, so 
pathetic, so full of happy tears,— the Illinois rail- 



21 

splitter leading his little son by the hand, God's bene- 
diction on his homely face, angels of forgiveness and 
mercy hovering around him as he walked the streets 
of Richmond, capital again of the old State of Virginia, 
capital of the Confederacy no longer, a poor emanci- 
pated slave woman kneeling at his feet and showering 
on them all she had, her kisses and her tears. The 
Union was preserved. Freedom was the equal right of 
all its children, white or black. The Declaration of 
Independence was vindicated. The house had not 
fallen: it had ceased to be divided; and Abraham 
Lincoln was forever enshrined in the heart of the re- 
public. 

Must it not be said that Abraham Lincoln's war 
policy, his policy in dealing with slavery as an element 
in the Union affecting its preservation, was right? 
When, in time of crisis, God charges a wise man with 
a special responsibility above his fellows, does he not 
sometimes give him special wisdom above them also? 

The Emancipation Proclamation is Abraham Lincoln's 
great fame scroll. To have at one stroke of the pen 
made 4,000,000 slaves free, — to have at one cut ripped 
the cancer from the republic, — there can be no greater 
glory in human history. Supplemented by the Thir- 
teenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the 
Federal Constitution, which, as Mr. Mead has said, 
were "the reduction to law of Lincoln's gospel and 
Lincoln's life," it is his patent to immortality. 

The colored race have every reason to cherish, as they 
do, the memory of Abraham Lincoln. All that man 
could do for them he did. They had unnumbered 
advocates, intense, devoted, true, but none who, in 



22 

addition to all else, was so wise as he. Greater love 
hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for 
his friends. But Lincoln not only laid down his life 
for them, but had already given for years the very ful- 
ness of it to their uplift. He struck the shackles from 
their limbs; he struck the more chafing shackles from 
their souls. He gave them manhood. He made them 
soldiers of the republic. He pointed them to the paths 
of education and material thrift, and through these to 
the fruitions of equal citizenship. He was no fanatic. 
The Federal Constitution was to him no "league with 
hell," but the expedient instrument of a blessed union 
which with patience and wise pressure could yet be 
moulded into provision for the equal rights under it 
of all men, whatever their race or color. He did not 
shut his eyes to racial differences and to the social dis- 
criminations which have sprung therefrom. But from 
the first he held to the faith that the ' ' negro is entitled 
to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration 
of Independence," and that, "in the right to eat the 
bread without the leave of anybody else which his own 
hand earns he is the equal of every living being." Be- 
yond the first step of freedom he was too wise to press 
the negro forward too rapidly, either for his own good 
or for the good of the republic. With what seems now 
the pith of common sense he would give him, as he 
would have given men of any other race or color, train- 
ing to fit him for the functions of citizenship. He 
would have given him education, whether of the school 
of military service or of the primer or copy book or 
of industrial attainment, before conferring upon him 
suffrage during the war, thus making it the expression 



23 

of an intelligent and responsible citizenship rather 
than a premature agency of social disorder and politi- 
cal corruption. He would have deprecated any tidal 
wave of ignorance and irresponsibility deluging the 
Southern States and retarding their return not only to 
national prosperity, but to the sentiment of national 
union. Had he lived, would he not, with his rare tact, 
have saved us the blunder of unfitted and swamping 
immediate universal suffrage too early conferred? 
Would he rather not have laid the foundations of uni- 
versal suffrage in such agencies as later have found ex- 
pression in work like that of Booker Washington? 
Later and in due season the Fourteenth and Fifteenth 
Amendments to the Federal Constitution would have 
followed the Thirteenth, which was adopted during Lin- 
coln s administration, and the three would have been the 
consummation of his policy. He would have combined, 
as he always did, the natural rights, whether of the 
negro or any other citizen, with expedient development 
in the use and enjoyment of them. Had his policy 
prevailed, freedom would have meant to the enfran- 
chised slave, not political office or its flamboyant 
badges and titles, but the bountiful full fruit of the 
right to eat the bread which his own hand earns, to add 
to his intellectual and material acquisitions, to prove 
by his thrift, by his attainments in scholarship, and by 
his accumulation of property, as he is now so abun- 
dantly proving, his capacity for full participation in 
affairs. The colored citizen would have been saved the 
humiliation of his early ejectment from precipitant 
political occupation, and would sooner have secured, 
as he is now securing, that call to political service which 



24 

comes, and will hereafter more and more come, to what- 
ever man stands out with evident fitness for it. This 
is the true future and true aim for the colored race. 
And this is what Lincoln, their best friend and the best 
friend of their former masters, would have had them 
have. Would he could have lived to note their schools 
and colleges, their wide-spread industries, their men 
eminent in institutional, professional, and social life, 
their teachers and poets and novelists, their successful 
merchants, farmers, and manufacturers! Had he lived, 
is it too much to say that this rising tide in their affairs 
would have sooner set in? And, were he living, with 
what faith would they still turn to him in every con- 
tingency, sure of justice at his hands! His legacy to 
us is the duty of the same justice at our hands. Our 
tributes to him are but lip-service, if we do not see to it 
that no tinge of black or red in any man's skin shall be 
permitted to discriminate him in his rights under the 
law as a citizen from any other citizen of the Union or 
of any State in it. 

Two adjectives that seem especially to describe 
Lincoln's relation to the great work to which he was 
called are "apt" and "adequate." No man ever 
made less pretence. His integrity and truth were struc - 
tural, born in him. His magnanimity, his superiority 
to personal feeling, are almost unparalleled in public 
life. It animated every impulse. It breathed in his 
repeated invitations to the Confederate government to 
personal interviews on terms of peace; in his dealings 
with his civil and military subordinates when unsuc- 
cessful or at fault; in his patience with McClellan, his 
consideration for Burnside, his wise counsel to Hooker, 



25 

his self-effacing disinterestedness towards Chase. It 
made him quicker to take than to lay blame. And, 
when at his death, his record was recalled, that mag- 
nanimity the whole world recognized. He had con- 
quered its admiration. He had shamed its prejudice 
and ridicule; and the "scurrile jester," penitent and 
atoning, was among the first, to his honor be it remem- 
bered, to lay his garland on the martyr's grave. His 
gentleness and tenderness of heart allied him to the 
very springs of sympathy and opened his ear to the 
humblest that sought it. A quaint humor flavored his 
informal speech with a homely relish, and was, as he 
used to suggest, his safety-valve during those exacting 
years of the war. It has been exaggerated, no doubt, 
in the report of it, yet it always kept him in popular 
rapport. More than this, it was a keen instrument, 
purposely used as such, to carve his way to essential 
results, either in debate or in administration. It was 
the humor, not of a clown, but of a diplomatist. In 
this respect, as also in respect to a seeming waste of 
his attention in arranging petty details of official pat- 
ronage with Congressmen and office-seekers who 
hounded him, — a thing which so unfavorably impressed 
some men of distinction who sought him on the higher 
themes of State, — I recall a remark of Mr. Root. It 
was to the effect that all this was largely the shrewd 
method, where no other would serve, of that conciliation 
of interests and that winning of Congressional help, 
by means of which measures vitally necessary to the 
great work in hand were secured, and which with less 
tact and sacrifice would have been lost. 
And, with the country at large, with what consum- 



26 

mate divination and wisdom Lincoln now led, now met, 
now followed, but always grasped and held — making 
it the mighty backing of his administration — the public 
sentiment! Thank God it never lost faith in him! 

The literature of Lincoln in his political and State 
papers is of the highest order, unsurpassed, if equalled. 
In temper and tone, in convincing force with at the 
same time regardful consideration of others' views, 
restrained in expression, never extravagant or offensive, 
and thus making his personal argument more effective, 
they are models at once of strength and tact and taste 
in the discussion of questions of State. The style of 
this graduate from a log cabin is consummate. His 
phrasing, his neat antithesis, his clearness of statement, 
his compelling argument, his choice of apt words, his 
telling metaphors and illustrations, and the exquisite 
framework of his prepared speech, always simple, yet 
always complete, gave to his masterpieces the rare 
excellence of the King James version of Holy Writ. 
David sang not with a purer cadence or a more exalted 
vision. 

But far above the style is the spirit of that litera- 
ture, the heart that inspired it, beating for all his 
fellow-men, even those who reviled him and said all 
manner of evil against him. His earlier public speeches, 
before his higher prominence, had often the broader 
flavor of the stump, and were attuned to attract and 
convince the popular environment to which he ap- 
pealed. But in the great debate with Douglas and in 
the speeches of that time he began to strike higher 
chords. And, beginning with his Cooper Institute ad- 
dress and all through his State papers and formal 



27 

utterances, he rose to the height of the benediction and 
charity of the divine Master. The State papers of no 
other publicist in tone and spirit are so responsive to 
the pattern of Jesus. His appeals were forever to jus- 
tice and fairness. He never lost sight of the other side. 
He gave full credit to its argument, its claims, its rights, 
its temptations, and its extenuations, whether he con- 
tended with it in debate or fought it in battle, yea, 
even in the very stress of the angry fire of treason and 
war. You cannot read him then that there sounds not 
in your ear the sweet accompaniment of a heavenly 
voice, saying, "As ye would that men should do to 
you, do ye also to them likewise," "Judge not that 
ye be not judged," "Love your enemies, do good to 
them which hate you," "Father, forgive them, for they 
know not what they do." 

And yet this man was untutored in schools of divinity, 
save in the great school of nature's open providence 
and the Bible of the lowly fireside, caring for no theol- 
ogy save that of love to God and to his fellow-men. I 
love to think that in one of his successors the force of 
his example in this respect is manifest in the State 
papers, as also in the spirit, of the lamented McKinley, 
who, as those who were in close touch with him were 
always conscious, made himself a disciple of Lincoln 
and patterned him, — like him, alas! even in his martyr's 
death. May the same high and inspiring ideal be always 
the guiding star of those who rule our beloved land! 

In that terrible struggle which involved the outroot- 
ing of human slavery, Lincoln never forgot that neither 
side was innocent of its existence among us, or that 
the people of the South believed in their cause and in 



28 

their construction of their rights under the Federal Con- 
stitution. To him they were the erring, not the malevo- 
lent, brother; and the moment they laid down their arms 
their sins were forgiven them. In the Cooper Institute 
speech, in the two nobly generous inaugurals, and, in- 
deed, always, what charity, what reaching out of the 
welcoming hand, what appeal to every sentiment of 
brotherhood, what pleading for righteousness and peace 
and good will! To-day the South knows and feels all 
this. The mists and passions of half a century ago have 
faded away, and the memory of Lincoln shines like a 
star in the serene heaven of our Union in which it is 
our brightest link. 

And shall not we of this new century rise as a nation 
to the ideal of that lofty time of which he became the 
incarnation, — the ideal of a republic not lost in material 
interests, great and important as they are; not blinded 
with the glare of prosperity, wide and comforting as it 
is; not bent on becoming a defiant world power, large 
as are the responsibilities that come with it; but de- 
voted to righteousness as a people, to the eradication 
of every root of misery and wretchedness and injustice 
in our soil, and to the elevation of the humblest and 
poorest and weakest? Our apotheosis of Lincoln, even 
if exaggerated, should lift us out of the murk and stress 
and tumult of our time, and bring the jarring ele- 
ments of our social and industrial life to a better 
understanding. 

Had he lived, who does not feel that the reunion 
of the national heart would have far more speedily 
followed the reunion of political bands! Reconstruc- 
tion was a most difficult problem, and the utmost 



29 

respect is to be had for the convictions of the great 
and patriotic men who differed as to its solution. 
But I cannot doubt that the ultimate verdict of dis- 
interested consideration, free from the intense feeling 
of his time, will be with Lincoln. To him it was a 
practical, not a theoretical or sentimental, question. 
He did not regard it as worth while to determine 
nicely whether by their rebellion the Confederate States 
had lost their statehood in the Union or had remained 
in it. If the former, it is difficult to see why they had 
not accomplished all that they attempted. We fought 
to keep them in, and, if the victory was ours as it 
was, they were logically and in fact still States in the 
Union, though their relations with the national govern- 
ment were of course so disturbed and chaotic that 
legislation was necessary to readjust those relations 
and to safeguard all the interests involved. Such was 
undoubtedly Lincoln's view, but he was looking to 
conditions, not to theories. Beginning with Louisiana, 
as soon as a reasonably large portion of its citizens 
organized a State government, adopted a free con- 
stitution, confirmed the Thirteenth National Consti- 
tutional Amendment abolishing slavery, provided 
public schools for white and black, and em- 
powered their legislature to give the suffrage to the 
colored man, he would have restored that State to 
its harmony in the Union. The example would have 
been followed in other States. No doubt the process 
of such reconstruction would have been accompanied 
by injustices to the freedmen; but the triumphant 
loyal majorities of the North would have safeguarded 
them, so that, whatever their hardships in the transition, 



30 

these would probably have been small compared with 
those that came under the course adopted after Lin- 
coln's death. Ten years of a reconstruction rule that 
is a melancholy and disastrous period in our history 
would have been mitigated. The enmities of the war 
would have been quieted rather than accentuated. 
The increased prejudice arising against the negro 
from the natural bitterness of his former masters at 
being made his political subject, and rankling even 
to this day, would have been checked. Had Lin- 
coln lived, with his hold on popular sentiment, with 
the prestige of his triumph over disunion, with his 
sagacity and persuasiveness, with his knowledge of 
the South and its responding appreciation of his 
charity towards it, it is not too much to believe that 
he would have made his policy the country's policy 
of reconstruction. Where he could not have wholly 
carried his point, he would have modified it with- 
out wholly sacrificing his views to those of the leaders 
of the more radical wing. But the result would have 
been, in the main, the carrying out of his. We should 
have been saved the bitter contentions of Congress 
with his successor, and the ship of state would have 
ridden into safe harbor with no mutiny on board and 
the captain in command. 

Indeed, could Sumner have been conciliated to Lin- 
coln's views, it would have been comparatively smooth 
sailing. Personal friends, their one main difference 
in the matter of reconstruction was as to the immediate 
bestowal of suffrage upon the negro. No plan would 
Sumner accept that did not give it. Any plan would 
Lincoln accept that would restore peace and the Union 



31 

and insure the rights of the negro in due season. To 
utilize his own homely illustration of the egg and the 
fowl, he would make sure of the fowl by hatching the 
egg rather than by smashing it; while Sumner, un- 
compromising in his high sense of supreme duty and 
single-eyed to what he regarded as absolutely right, 
would sooner smash the egg than have a chicken not 
fully fledged. It is interesting to think what would 
have been the course and outcome of the struggle be- 
tween these two great leaders,— the great doctrinaire, 
who was contented only with the consummation of his 
convictions, though the heavens fell, and the great 
pacificator, who would secure the same ultimate jus- 
tice, though he gave time to the heavens to clear. 
Again, it can hardly be doubted that the same pa- 
tient tact, the same hold on the popular sentiment, the 
same persuasive appeal, the same winning sympathy 
with the plain people which had won the debate with 
Douglas, which through the war had gathered to 
Lincoln's support the constantly rising volume of the 
nation's faith and confidence, would have given him 
the guidance in the reconstruction of the Union. 

The j uster verdict of lapsing time recognizes the 
honest purpose of Lincoln's immediate successor in 
his views on reconstruction, which were perhaps not 
far removed from Lincoln's own. And yet there could 
be no more striking illustration than the contrast 
between the two men of that marvellous sense and 
wisdom which Lincoln never failed to bring to the 
solution of every entanglement. Not of him could 
it be said, 

"Vis consili expers mole ruit sua." 



32 

His not the tomahawk of Metacom, but the persuasive- 
ness of John Eliot. 

You all know the story of Lincoln's death, that 
tragedy of the war. The rebellion was crushed, the 
war over, the slave free. The great prophet and mag- 
istrate had fought the good fight and kept the faith. 
The pistol bullet of a drunken, mad assassin cut the 
thread of life, and Abraham Lincoln was dead, a mar- 
tyr on the altar of his country. 

As we read history, — thank God, it is true rather 
of the past than the present, — what vice, what filth, 
what insolence, what grinding of the poor, what in- 
difference to human suffering, what contempt of human 
rights, what rot and shame and meanness, have been 
the personal characteristics, though sometimes asso- 
ciated with great qualities and achievements, of most 
of the rulers of the world ! What wonder that revolu- 
tion has so often come in riot and rivers of blood! 
What a relief to turn to this chosen of the people without 
stain or spot, this pure in heart and blessed of the 
Lord! I love to picture in my mind's eye not more 
the ruler than the man. I fancy him at the con- 
summation of his glory, the crown of honor lifted to 
his head not only by his country but by the world, yet 
simple and unaffected still. I fancy him standing 
beneath the stars on the heights of the Soldiers' Home, 
gazing over the roofs of Washington and across the 
historic Potomac, alone and lonely, dreaming not of 
his fame and prestige, but of the early pioneer days, 
the meagre honest home, the mother's devotion, the 
early struggles, the first revelations of the printed page, 
the first thrills of ambition for larger life, the growing 



33 

consciousness and exercise of natural powers, the 
free unconventional life of the prairie, the steady eleva- 
tion to higher service, the people's tournament of 
debate, the long four years of chief magistracy of the 
nation, years tumultuous with war and intricate with 
statecraft, a nation in convulsion, an earthquake of 
rending forces, a fire sweeping the land, but after and 
above all the still small voice of an approving con- 
science at peace with God. 

Not his that saddest of all historic destinies, — the 
fate of that mighty dynamo that once shook the world 
but at last stood an inert lump on a lone rock in mid- 
ocean, — "coelum undique, et undique pontus," — his 
glories and principalities and powers now only dust in 
his hands, and his heart broken. 

And how truly it may be said of Lincoln, he still 
lives! He lives in bronze and marble and canvas; 
he lives in the memory of a grateful country. His sym- 
pathy with the plain people, felt by him and by them, 
yet indescribable in words, has given him a place in 
their hearts closer than that of any other public man. 
He will stand with Washington foremost among our 
great ones. We lack discrimination when we say of 
this or that man that he was the greatest. But this 
may be said of Lincoln, that of all Americans, if not of 
all men of the nineteenth century, he achieved the most 
enduring, the greatest and purest fame. With neither 
the culture of Sumner nor the might of Webster, yet 
either of them in Lincoln's place you instinctively 
feel would have fallen below him in the discharge of his 
trust. No doubt his growth upward was largely due 
to his presidential culture and pruning, and that he was 



34 

a greater man at its close than at its beginning. And, 
when we speak of him as great, we mean great in the 
general impressive sense. There is a greatness of pure 
intellect, of pure force, independent of circumstances, 
like some tall memorial shaft springing from the earth 
to the sky. There is another greatness that is like 
some mountain-side rich with foliage and verdure, 
towering above the plain and yet a part of it. Lincoln, 
no doubt, in marvellous variety of talent comes short of 
Franklin, in quick fertility of genius of Hamilton, in 
philosophic vision of Jefferson. But in impressiveness 
on his time and in his stamp on history and public 
sentiment Lincoln leads. He is the great American of 
his age, 

" New birth of our new soil, the First American. " 
There is an element in this kind of popular greatness 
without which the title of great is never at last conferred. 
It is the moral element of sincerity and truth. There 
have been men who rendered inestimable services to 
their country, whose wopds were patriotic fire, whose 
shoulders upheld the republic, and yet there goes with 
their names the unspoken consciousness of a lack of en- 
tire faith in them. It is the singular glory of Lincoln 
that with all his ambition we feel he was true to the 
profoundest moral instincts. God be praised that amid 
all doubt and in spite of so many crumbling idols there 
be now and then — ay, often — a soul that mounts and 
keeps its place! Our tributes are not more to him 
personally than to the ideal of moral character which 
we have taught ourselves and are teaching our children 
that he stands for. There he the true significance and 
value of our exaltation of him. 



35 

Honor to your memory, homely rail-splitter Presi- 
dent, that no act or motive of yours has ever been 
counted in derogation of the integrity of your life or 
example. Good and faithful servant, stand forever 
forth in the people's hall of fame, crowned with their 
undying love and praise — sainted — immortal! 



JUL 7 1910 






*■£ 



